Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan Rhetorical Strategies

Gifted author of Fish Cheeks, Amy Tan, assures young girls that being different is not only acceptable, but also advantageous. Rhetorical strategies-such as imagery, tone, diction, and appeals (logos, ethos, pathos)-were the brushes with which she painted a portrait of self-acceptance for teenage girls everywhere. Tan uses a sympathetic tone to relate to the awkward teenage reader that is experiencing the same thing and the nostalgic adult reader that has experienced.

Tan’s word choice [diction] exposes her insecurity in her heritage and desire to be an average American teenager, in her opening. The author described traditional American food in an appealing way, “…roasted turkey and sweet potatoes…” but omitted any detail about “…Chinese food.” She labeled American manners as “proper”, but dubbed her relatives and their Chinese customs as “noisy”. The significance of this strategy lies in its ability to make the text relatable. The entire narrative relies on the author’s shared experience with the audience, being ashamed of their incongruity and their pursuit of normality.

In the third paragraph, Tan enlists the aid of imagery to provide the reader with a more accurate depiction of the scenery on that night. Vividly detailing the assortment of food; Tan was not describing how she saw the food but how she feared Robert would. As revealed later in the text, Tan is quite fond of her culture’s taboo cuisine. So, the description of the food using negatively connoted words like slimy, bulging, fleshy, rubbery, and fungus were used to transmit her concern about how she and her family would be perceived. This use of imagery and diction exemplifies Tan’s transmission of emotion-first worry and anxiety, then relief and acceptance- to her audience throughout the text.

The appeals to ethos and pathos were vital for Tan to be able to relate to the audience. She had to first establish her credibility as someone who had experienced being a part...

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...﻿Isabel Loeper
Period 4
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In Amy Tan’s FishCheeks, published in a 1987 issue of Seventeen Magazine, Tan wishes to let her audience know that it is okay to want to be different, but always hold on to who you were before as well. Ms. Tan drew in the audience by beginning her story with the common line about love. She made things interesting by tell us that her crush was set to join her at Christmas Eve. She went on to explain that her Chinese cultural family was an embarrassment to her. When her crush got to her house, she avoided him and anyway that she could embarrass herself. It didn’t take long for her family to step right up and embarrass her however. Soon after dinner, the minister and his family left and Tan was given a gift by her mother. Her mother warned her that it is okay to want to look different, thus the gift of a mini skirt, but her mother also warned her that she should never be ashamed of where she came from.
Tone
Dramatic; Humorous; Hyperbolistic; Reflective
Discourse
Narration; Description
Rhetorical Terms
Rhetorical question – “What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas? What would he think of our noisy Chinese relatives who lacked proper American manners?” (p. 2)
Dash – “And then they arrived – the minister's family and all my relatives in a clamor of doorbells and rumpled...

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...forging one’s own identity and gaining autonomy. Waverly understands this: while Lindo believes that her daughter’s crooked nose means that she is ill-fated, Waverly dismisses this passive interpretation and changes her identity and her fate by reinventing the story that is told about a crooked nose.
•
• All the stories in her books are interlocking personal narrative in different voices. The narrators appear as characters in each other’s stories as well as tell their own stories, Tan does not have to fully develop the narrator’s voice in each story.
While American daughters like Jing-mei employ personal narrative as a way of telling stories, the
’’ Because this indirect means is the only way Jing-mei’s mother can interpret and express her experiences, she is shocked into silence when her daughter speaks directly about the daughters she abandoned in China years earlier.
Point of View
• In “Two Kinds” the perspective moves back and forth between the adult and then child. In this way, Tan tells the story through the child’s innocent view and the adult’s experienced eyes. This allows reader to make judgments of their own, to add their own interpretations of the mother daughter struggle.
Figurative Language
• This literary device also invites readers to think about the way memory itself functions, how we use events in the past to help make sense of our present.
• Literary critic Ben Xu explains that ‘‘it is not just that we have...

...
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